Year-End solutions

Neil Williams linux at codehelp.co.uk
Thu Mar 31 12:15:19 EST 2005


On Thursday 31 March 2005 11:17 am, Beth Leonard wrote:
> 2) Start each year with a fresh file each year, but the same account
> names.  You do this with File->Export->Export Accounts.  There is a little
> bit in the tutorial about this (Appendix B: FAQ B3.3) it tells the
> "how" but not the "why" of why you want to do this.
>
> This method has the advantage of not needing to start totally from
> scratch each year, but the disadvantage of not preserving all of your
> auto-completion information for transactions and imported data.

The Export Chart of Accounts to QSF in the Gnome2 port will make this easier. 
It allows you to export the full chart *with balances* as of a certain date.  
This will then be importable into a new file. It's mostly done, just a little 
more work on the Splits and the merge druid. You can export for any date, not 
just the typical year end, which will solve problems with customised year-end 
dates. The balance is the balance of the account on that date (midnight) and 
is created in the export as an "Opening Balance" with a suitable Equity 
account to receive the paired Split.

It's not a full solution to year-end and it is not "book closing", it's not 
intended as anything more than an export of the chart of accounts, but it 
could be used for such purposes.

>   Q: Is there book-closing support, yet?
>
>     A: There is some support in CVS, and we're curious to hear your
>   feedback about it. A not-unreasonable work around is to copy your data
>   file, and edit it to add zeroing transactions to each income/expense
>   account.

It would not be impossible to adapt the CoA export code to export the accounts 
PRIOR to the specified date and calculate the zeroing transactions for you. I 
could work on that if there is interest. Book closing is about the previous 
year, so exporting for the new year doesn't close the previous year without 
some more code. Also, it would need to check for scheduled transactions so 
that if the book is opened later, the accounts are not updated with 
transactions that occur after the closure date. It could be a natural partner 
for CoA export. The transactions that close one book by zeroing the accounts 
will correspond to those that are created to generate opening balances in the 
new book.

> I use debian and it has been quite some time since I've compiled
> something -- does trying out something from CVS mean installing
> or compiling source from somewhere?

Yes. GnuCash is a large project and it takes some time to prepare your system 
and build from source. It also takes a significant amount of filespace - the 
build alone can be >300Mb on Debian. (Can take >1hr when automated on my 
system).

You need to be on Debian unstable to get the correct versions of some of the 
dependencies for the Gnome2 port.

HowTo:
http://www.gnucash.org/en/hacking.phtml

You login and export the source. Use:
./autogen.sh --enable-opt-style-install --prefix=/opt/gnucash
or a similar path for the installed build. Then make, make check and make 
install. A default export will be the HEAD branch. The next release is likely 
to come from the gnucash-gnome2-dev branch:
cvs -d :pserver:cvs at cvs.gnucash.org:/home/cvs/cvsroot checkout 
gnucash-gnome2-dev

Read the README.cvs and HACKING to get some idea of what's needed.

The list of dependencies you'll need (as Debian package names):
http://code.neil.williamsleesmill.me.uk/preface.html

> As for hand-editing files to try that as a solution to the year-end
> close out problem, I make it a point not to hand-edit data files for
> my finances.  If I screw something up, I at least want the program
> that made the files to still be able to read them.

But you've always got a copy. Edit a copy and test it.

-- 

Neil Williams
=============
http://www.dcglug.org.uk/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/
http://www.neil.williamsleesmill.me.uk/
http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/attachments/20050331/fc75233e/attachment.bin


More information about the gnucash-user mailing list